Authors: James Grippando
Black Horizon (36 page)
“Would you excuse me one minute?” said the technician.
“Where are you going?”
“I’ll be right back.”
She got up and left, closing the door behind her. Andie reached out and took Jack’s hand. “She’s acting weird,” said Andie.
“I’m sure it’s nothing.”
“What if it’s not ‘nothing’?”
“Let’s just wait and see.”
The door opened. The technician had an older man with her.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Peters,” he said.
“Is there something wrong?” asked Andie.
“Let me just have a look here,” said the doctor. He studied the image on the screen, showing no expression. He applied the transducer to Andie’s belly. Rather than the sweeping motions of the technician, his placement seemed more specific, almost surgical in its precision.
“Have you been experiencing any morning sickness?” he asked.
“I did,” said Andie. “It stopped about ten days ago.”
He put the transducer down and looked straight at Andie. He didn’t have to say anything. It was in his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “This pregnancy is not viable.”
“What?”
“Are you sure?” asked Jack.
“There’s no heartbeat,” the doctor said. “There never was. Development stopped at five weeks.”
“But . . . why?”
“There could be any number of reasons. It’s nothing you did.”
Jack could hear Andie catch her breath, as if all the oxygen had suddenly been sucked from the room.
“But I was . . . I was so sure I was pregnant. Just two days ago I was running to the bathroom, getting false alarms.”
“Sometimes when you read the pregnancy books, you memorize what the symptoms are supposed to be, and you almost will yourself to feel them.”
“No, it was real. I had to pee so bad.”
“It’s possible. That’s the strange thing about silent miscarriage. Women sometimes continue to experience the symptoms of pregnancy. But the real indicator here was the end of your morning sickness.”
Andie was silent, her gaze cast toward the blinking monitor.
The doctor rose. “Stay here as long as you need. But before you leave, stop at the front desk. We’ll need to schedule a D and C.”
“A what?” asked Jack.
“Dilation and curettage. It’s a simple outpatient procedure to clean out the uterus. I am sorry.” The doctor left the room.
The technician wiped the gel from Andie’s belly. “We’ll talk more in a minute,” she said. “I’ll give you two a little time alone.”
The door closed.
Jack and Andie locked eyes, each staring at the other in disbelief. She sat up, and Jack sat next to her at the edge of the table.
“There are some tissues in my purse,” she said. “Could you hand me one, please?”
“Sure.”
He reached inside. He found the tissues, but something else caught his eye. He wasn’t sure what made him pull it from Andie’s purse, but he did. It was a little stuffed animal, a pink duck with the tag still on it. Dinosaur Hill.
“Her first toy,” said Andie, her voice quaking.
“I’m so sorry, sweetheart.”
“I saw this cute little shop in the East Village on Friday. I knew I shouldn’t go in, but I did. I thought, Oh, you can buy just
one
thing. And then yesterday, like an idiot, I went shopping again. I was so sure we were having a baby girl. I bought all this stuff, blankets and blocks and—”
“It’s okay, Andie. Everything is going to be o—”
Before he could get it out, Andie was in his arms, clinging to him, holding him tighter than she’d ever held him before. Jack wanted to say the right thing, but there was nothing to say.
In the four years he’d been in love with Andie Henning, Jack had known her to run down drug dealers in a dark alley at midnight. He’d seen the cuts and bruises on her body after an undercover assignment that she couldn’t tell him anything about. He’d lain on the other side of their bed and listened to her talk on the telephone until three a.m., comforting a mother who’d lost a daughter to a serial killer. He’d seen a tear of joy in the corner of her eye on their wedding day, and he’d seen her choke up at movies. But this morning was a first.
It was the first time he’d seen Andie let go and cry. Really cry. Like a baby.
A
t two p.m. Jack was in the waiting room at the hospital’s surgical center.
Andie’s doctor had described the D and C as a fifteen-minute procedure. He’d left out at least three hours of waiting around. The prep was minimal, since she’d requested only local anesthesia, but Jack was getting zippo in the way of status updates from the nurse at the front desk. Since Andie’s transfer to the surgical suite, Jack had been stuck sitting three chairs away from a hard-of-hearing old man who was “sick and tired of spill coverage,” and who insisted on blasting
Family Feud
on the only television in the waiting room.
Survey says: Your time is up, old man.
“Sorry, I really need to change this,” said Jack, as he switched to cable news. A wetland ecologist from the Everglades Foundation was being interviewed live from Islamorada, the turquoise waters of Florida Bay behind her.
“Most of Florida Bay is part of Everglades National Park,” said the scientist, “and it contributes approximately one-point-one billion dollars to the Monroe County economy in terms of boating, bird watching, and recreational fishing. Scientifically speaking, the bay is an estuary, approximately one thousand square miles of shallows where freshwater from the Florida Everglades on the mainland flows into the sea. The next twenty-four hours will be critical in telling us how much oil we can expect to intrude north from the middle Keys into these estuaries, and how much is carried east into deeper waters.”
From three chairs away, Jack felt an angry stare coming from the game-show addict. He glanced in the old man’s direction, which triggered a snarky comment.
“You realize I’m missing the lightning round.”
Jack’s time in Key West and the Caribbean had left him out of touch with the mainland, but the old man was surprisingly typical. To anyone in the Keys, the spill was a nightmare, but to the average Joe in the next county, it was at most a nuisance. Jack supposed that when restaurants on South Beach started serving fresh Florida stone crabs with a side of brake fluid, people in Miami-Dade County might tune in.
The television interview continued. “There are folks who will call scientists like me Chicken Little, but this is an area that could be lost forever to future generations.”
Future generations.
It reminded Jack why he was at the hospital, what he and Andie had lost.
Jack’s cell rang. He tossed the TV remote to the old man, told him to have at it, and walked outside to take the call. It was Theo, from Nassau.
“When are you coming back?” asked Theo.
It was about the last thing on the Jack’s mind. “Theo, I’ve only been gone six hours.”
“I hate to sound needy, dude. But you were exactly right about how this murder was gonna play on the news here. My picture is on the front page of the
Nassau Guardian
right next to Jeffries. It’s like we hit the lottery. Jeffries is the hundred-twenty-ninth murder this year, which breaks a freakin’ record for the Bahamas, and it’s only October. Everyone is making a huge deal out of this, saying how the Bahamas needs to get crime under control, how all these murders are killing tourism, no pun intended—that kind of thing.”
“Can you e-mail me the story?”
“Just go online. Search ‘Theo Knight, Royal Bahamas Police,’ and”—he turned on his Bahamian accent—“‘frightfully scary murderous scoundrel,’ mon.”
Jack massaged away the oncoming headache between his eyes. “Not good.”
“Tell me about it. Even Bruschetta is wigged out.”
It took Jack a moment to decode that one. “Is Brunelli with you?”
“Yeah, we’re still at the motel. Right now the cops don’t even know where I am. He’s afraid if we go out, someone might call the police and I’ll end up arrested.”
“Has an arrest warrant been issued?”
“No. I don’t think so. Honestly, I don’t know.”
“Let me talk to Brunelli.”
“He’s on his phone.”
“Tell him to call me.”
“Hey, hold on a second, I got another call.”
“No, Theo, don’t take it!”
Too late. Theo had him on hold, and Jack had an all-too-real fear that the call was from the Bahamian chief of police. A minute or so ticked away as Jack took a walk around the traffic circle outside the entrance to the surgical center. He had the phone to his ear, still waiting, when a nurse came outside to get him.
“You can see your wife now, Mr. Swyteck. She’s just coming out of her anesthesia.”
“Coming out? It was supposed to be local anesthesia.”
“It ended up being more of a twilight.”
“Is everything okay?”
“She’s fine. A little groggy, but that’s normal.”
Jack followed the nurse inside, allowing Theo just a little more time to come back on the line. He was about to give up and disconnect when Theo suddenly returned, his voice racing.
“Dude, it was her again.”
“Who?”
“Josefina.”
Jack stopped cold, halfway across the lobby. The half-deaf old man clutched the TV remote and said, “Don’t even think about changing the channel.”
Jack spoke into his phone. “What does she want?”
“A million bucks, cash,” said Theo. “First installment of the ten million. And she wants you to deliver it. In Cuba.”
The nurse was holding the door open to the surgical suite. “Are you coming, Mr. Swyteck?”
“Are you gonna go, Jack?” asked Theo.
“It’s time for the
Fami-leee Feud
!” the television blasted.
Jack told Theo he’d call him right back, tucked his phone away, and followed the nurse down the bright, sterile hallway.
“You don’t happen to have any of that twilight anesthesia left over, do you?” he asked.
T
he post-op recovery room was a collection of patient bays separated by privacy curtains that hung from the ceiling. On any given weekday morning it might have been abuzz with surgeons, nurses, and a steady stream of patients wheeled in and out on gurneys. But not on a Sunday afternoon. For almost forty-five minutes, Andie was the only patient in the room, and Jack sat at her bedside until she shook off the effects of her twilight anesthesia. A nurse came by to ask how she was doing. Then she pulled Jack out of the bay to give him a little advice.
“There’s an emergency C-section coming in here in about five minutes. You should probably keep the curtain closed.”
“Understood,” said Jack. “I hope it went okay.”
“Perfect,” the nurse said.
Jack returned to Andie, curtain closed. She was starting to look like herself, but it was clear that she didn’t want to talk about the procedure, the miscarriage, or how she felt. At first, she didn’t want to take any telephone calls, and Jack watched her let a call from Seattle—her mother—go to voice mail. The next call was different. It was an invitation to dive into work, a healing strategy that he had seen Andie use before. The call was from Agent Brunelli in the Bahamas.
“Hold on one second,” she said into her phone. “Let me ask Jack to step out.”
Jack gave her the required privacy and went to the other side of the empty recovery room. He was standing near the entrance, checking his phone for messages and passing time, when the double pneumatic doors opened. In came the new mother, flat on her back and unconscious, nurses’ aides on either side of the gurney. Jack assumed that the young man bringing up the rear, eyes of confusion peering out from over a surgical mask, was the father.
“Congratulations,” said Jack.
“Thanks,” he said. “Twins!”
A wave of mixed emotions washed over Jack, and he wondered how long such feelings would linger. A week? A year? Until Andie got pregnant again? What if she couldn’t get pregnant again?
Jack’s phone vibrated with a text. It was from Andie:
Come back now.
He went back to her bay on the other side of the room and closed the curtain.
“Does Brunelli know about the phone call Theo got?” asked Jack.
“Yes. Theo told him, and then he passed it on to our team leader.”
“Which you can’t say anything more about, of course. I know, I know.”
“Actually, I can,” said Andie.
“Andie, don’t go breaking any rules for me.”
“I’m not,” she said. “We’ve reached a very strange intersection of our worlds where I would need to have this conversation if you weren’t my husband. I’m not going to avoid having it because you
are
my husband.”
Jack pulled up a chair. “Are you actually going to ask me to deliver some money?”
“Here’s the situation, Jack. The man who kidnapped you knows enough about what happened to the Scarborough 8 to give us the exact sequence of alarms immediately prior to the explosion. He’s credible, and if he gets his million dollars, he’ll tell us who sabotaged the rig. I guess he thinks the more valuable information is
why
and
how
it happened, which he plans to milk for even more money. But for now we’ll settle for
who
. Right now, the FBI has no bigger priority than that.”
“But in addition to kidnapping me and Theo in Cuba, he just murdered a Bahamian banker. I know the FBI pays informants, but you can’t pay a million dollars to a kidnapper and a murderer.”
Andie didn’t answer.
“Seriously,” said Jack. “You
can’t
. Right?”
“No,” said Andie. “We can’t. But we can pretend to do it.”
“When you say ‘we,’ do you mean . . . me?”
“We know things about this man that you don’t know. He’s smart enough to insist that the money be delivered by someone he considers safe. Someone he will recognize immediately by sight, who he will know is not an undercover FBI agent. Someone who is an American civilian, whose safety the FBI won’t take any chances with.”
“Someone like me.”
“Yes. Someone like you.”
“Are you asking me to do this?”
